Four News Media Roles Shaping Agenda-building Processes

2010

ABSTRACT-In the research field of media and politics the agenda-setting approach is one of the main accounts. It theorizes about the impact of mass media coverage on political priorities. Yet, agenda-setting offers a one-sided perspective. It only takes into account the impact of media on politics and not the other way around and it only deals with positive power and neglects negative power-that is the power to prevent other actors from devoting attention to specific issues.

Journal of Communication, 2006

Recently the study of the relationship between the media and the political agenda has received growing attention of both media and political science scholars. However, these research efforts have not led to a general discussion or a real theory on the media's political agenda setting power. This article first analytically confronts the often contradictory results of the available evidence. Then, it sketches the broad outline of a preliminary theory. Political agenda setting by the media is contingent upon a number of conditions. The input variables of the model are the kind of issues covered, the specific media outlet, and the sort of coverage. Political context variables, the features of the political actors at stake, are at the heart of the model. The model proposes five sorts of output ranging from no political adoption to fast substantial adoption of media issues.

International Journal of Media, Security and Development, 2015

The agenda setting theory of the mass media has transcended almost all spheres of media influence studies. Scholars agreed that the theory has served as a foundation for understanding some other theories of media influence/effect. However, the boundaries of the tenets of the agenda setting theory which initially gives ‘absolute’ power to the mass media to set an agenda on what the public thinks about is presently been pushed by some extraneous factors that hitherto were of lesser considerations. Adopting a qualitative approach and using existing literature, this paper reviews the concept of the agenda setting theory of the media vis-à-vis factors that are shaping and possibly revamping the frontiers of the age long media theory. The paper establishes that although the mass media to a large extent still set the agenda, the activities leading to the agenda they set is not totally the original idea of the mass media as expected with their surveillance function. Individuals’ perception and background, typical media routine, economic considerations, public relations activities and lately, the activities of the social media have continuously shaped how and what the media set as the agenda for the public to discuss. It thus identifies an inter-media agenda-setting or a possible convergence-agenda setting because, at some point, a confluence exist in the ideologies of the parties leading to what the mass media eventually set as an agenda for the public. Thus, the paper makes a recommendation for studies and an expansion on the concept of media agenda setting in recognition of the contemporary developments which are modifying the assumptions of the theory. Keywords: .Mass media .Agenda setting .Inter-media/convergence-agenda setting .Confluence, Extraneous factors.

El papel de "agenda-setting" (fijación de la agenda) desempeñado por los medios informativos condiciona en gran medida no solamente el abanico de cosas que nos llaman la atención, sino también nuestra manera de entender el mundo ingente de asuntos públicos que existe más allá de nuestra experiencia personal. El Chapel Hill Study de 1972 marcó un antes y un después en el desarrollo de la teoría de agenda setting. Hasta este momento clave se había limitado a la influencia que ejercen los medios informativos sobre el público; a partir de este trascendente estudio la teoría abrió sus horizontes y empezó a abordar el proceso más amplio de agenda setting. La gama de asuntos abarcado por la teoría hoy en día va desde los condicionantes de la agenda mediática hasta los efectos de agenda-setting sobre las actitudes y opiniones. En este trabajo se presentan los resultados de dos estudios empíricos publicados recientemente en los EEUU. Estos dos estudios elaboran aún más este proceso. El primero explica cómo la prensa cambia el foco de su atención dentro de un acontecimiento informativo importante, iluminando primero un aspecto y luego otros para así establecer la prominencia de dicho acontecimiento en la agenda mediática. El segundo explica el efecto que ejerce la prominencia en la agenda mediática sobre la actitud del público y las opiniones que se tienen de las personalidades públicas.

Objective. The agenda-setting literature has demonstrated the media's ability to set the issue agenda for the public. One byproduct of this work is that researchers have produced some evidence suggesting that the audience will, on occasion, set the issue agenda for the media. Given disparate sets of findings, researchers do not have a framework to better understand on which issues the media will set the agenda for the public and on which issues the public will set the agenda for the media. It is the goal of this article to provide empirical support for a framework suggesting that the events comprising issue areas predetermine the direction of influence between the media's and the public's issue agendas. Methods. I construct a historical data set comprised of 35,000 stories from the nightly network news and responses to Gallup's Most Important Problem question. I look for evidence of causal influence between news issue content and public issue concerns using Granger analysis and vector autoregression. Results. Issue areas comprised of spectacular events, such as defense, will be reported by the media and subsequently affect the salience the audience assigns to those issues. In issues not normally comprised of spectacular and singular events, such as energy and environment, public issue concerns appear to drive issue coverage in the news. Issues such as transportation and education, which comprise few spectacular events and little public concern, will receive sparse coverage in the media. Conclusion. The findings provide support for a framework based on events; the types of events that typically comprise issue areas will affect the likelihood of those issues coming on the news agenda. This then affects the direction of influence between the public and the media. The framework supported here allows for the integration of the media effects and media content literatures. This has implications for understanding how the news agenda is constructed and how the commercial media meets democratic ideals.

1993

Public Opinion Quarterly, 1972

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International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Review, 2018

This paper examines the relevance of Agenda Setting theory in twenty first century Journalism practice. Agenda-setting theory describes the capacity of news media to influence and guide public discourse. That is, if a news item is covered frequently and prominently, the audience will regard the issue as more important. Agenda-setting theory was formally developed by Dr. Max McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw in a study on the 1968 presidential election. In the 1968 'Chapel Hill study,' McCombs and Shaw demonstrated a strong correlation between what 100 residents of Chapel Hill, North Carolina thought was the most important election issue and what the local and national news media reported was the most important issue. By comparing the salience of issues in news content with the public's perceptions of the most important election issue, McCombs and Shaw were able to determine the degree to which the media determines public opinion. Since the 1968 study, published in a 1972 edition of Public Opinion Quarterly, more than 400 studies have been published on the agenda-setting function of the mass media. The argument that the Agenda-Setting Theory is still very relevant in contemporary Journalism practice was advanced in the discourse. Based on the Social Responsibility and Gate-Keeping Theories, the paper focused on the Agenda Setting Theory of Communication, its implications, applications and continued relevance, highlighting the functions of the mass media. It is recommended that media stakeholders do more to ensure that issues that will enhance the socio-politico-economic well-being of the people are hyped regularly, to ensure the achievement of set objectives.

In this article, we review two research programs that could benefit from a more extensive dialogue: media and policy studies of agenda setting. We focus on three key distinctions that divide these two robust research programs: the agenda(s) under investigation (public versus policymaking), the typical level of analysis (individual versus systemic), and framing effects (individual versus macro level). We map out these differences and their impacts on understanding the policy process. There is often a policy disconnect in the agenda-setting studies that emanate from the media tradition. Though interested in the effects of political communication, scholars from this tradition often fail to link the media to policy outcomes, policy change, or agenda change. Policy process scholars have increasingly rejected simple linear models in favor of models emphasizing complex feedback effects. This suggests a different role for the media-one of highlighting attributes in a multifaceted political reality and involvement in positive feedback cycles. Yet, political communication scholars have for the most part been insensitive to these potentials. We advocate a shared agenda centering on the role of the media in the political system from an information processing framework, emphasizing the reciprocal effects of each on the other.

Comparative Political Studies, 2007

Do mass media determine or codetermine the political agenda? Available answers on this question are mixed and contradictory. Results vary in terms of the type of political agenda under scrutiny, the kind of media taken into account, and the type of issues covered. This article enhances knowledge of the media's political agenda-setting power by addressing each of these topics, drawing on extensive longitudinal measures of issue attentiveness in media, Parliament, and government in Belgium in the 1990s. Relying on time-series, cross-section analyses, the authors ascertain that although Belgium is characterized by a closed political system, the media do to some extent determine the agenda of Parliament and government. There is systematic variation in media effects, however. Newspapers exert more influence than does television, Parliament is somewhat more likely to follow media than government, and media effects are larger for certain issues (law and order, environment) than for oth...